mark s


Hey, the laptop should have plenty power.  I typically do the very same with my MOTU set up and a Pentium M laptop with 2 gig of ram and XP on it.  I record to an external hard drive.  Then I just burn to DVD when I'm done with it.  That's usually after I migrate it to the studio system,.. 

It's all good on paper, bar the single channel mode memory atm, though the latency checker shows a huge spike on rare occassions. Sits happy between 39 - 67us for ages, then from nowhere there's a 14512 spike. Reset and start again and it'll go for longer than needed consistantly low...
 
I've got a split setup too. Record with the laptop, process/mix/master on the DAW at home. Used to do the gating on the fly, but that was when I had a set venue. Decided it would be better at home in the quiet anyway, if the artist wanted it done of course :-P

You'll have to get rid of that spike. That spike can cause a glitch in the audio stream or even a dropout. Some laptops cannot be fixed. My son bought a Dell Studio , cost him $1,400 and he's a very highly qualified computer tech, He could not get rid of the latency spikes. He even sent it back to Dell but they had no clue and to them the machine worked 100%.
He ended up purchasing a $500 Acer that had no issues once tweaked.
With mine it was the battery management which you disable in the device manager. But there are other things that an OS can busy it self with causing the spikes.

The Tascam will record all 16 inputs but you need a digital source for channel 15/16 SPDIF. It gets tricky with word clock so I do not use it when multi tracking.
It is very true regarding your USB ports as well. I always use the same port and I do not plug any other USB devices in while recording. I use the touch pad.
Sounds like you may have to look into a better laptop if this one has those issues.

Don't tell anyone I suggested this: Record @ 24/48 then up convert the file before handing it back to the client. Dare anyone to claim it was not recorded otherwise. ( did I just say that? no,, couldn't have been me, must have been someone else.)

Cactus Music


You'll have to get rid of that spike. That spike can cause a glitch in the audio stream or even a dropout. Some laptops cannot be fixed. My son bought a Dell Studio , cost him $1,400 and he's a very highly qualified computer tech, He could not get rid of the latency spikes. He even sent it back to Dell but they had no clue and to them the machine worked 100%.
He ended up purchasing a $500 Acer that had no issues once tweaked.
With mine it was the battery management which you disable in the device manager. But there are other things that an OS can busy it self with causing the spikes.

The Tascam will record all 16 inputs but you need a digital source for channel 15/16 SPDIF. It gets tricky with word clock so I do not use it when multi tracking.
It is very true regarding your USB ports as well. I always use the same port and I do not plug any other USB devices in while recording. I use the touch pad.
Sounds like you may have to look into a better laptop if this one has those issues.

Don't tell anyone I suggested this: Record @ 24/48 then up convert the file before handing it back to the client. Dare anyone to claim it was not recorded otherwise. ( did I just say that? no,, couldn't have been me, must have been someone else.)

Naughty, tut!
 
I've got a Behringer Ultramatch covering the last two tracks and do the same USB socket I have used for it since purchase.
 
The spike only appears early on, so I went through and turned Task Scheduler off (after much rummaging) and looked to see what else might be about on the sly. Also updated the SSD firmware, but won't know how much of this will make a difference until I can get back to the studio.

Have you tried using an external drive to record the audio on your current system?  If I'm understanding correctly, right now you've only using the one internal  SSD drive, correct?  

davii
 
I've got 8Gb of RAM arriving in a few days, then I'll look to heading back to the studio to see how much of an impact that has. 
 

Ram has absolutely nothing to do with recording live audio.   Spend your money on something eles.
No need to record at 96K, it's just a wast of space on your harddrive.
 
Love my HD24, it fits in my rack with all my outboard gear !
 
Tim

I'll agree ram has nothing to do with audio recording.  I was doing 8 tracks 96/24 with a P-II and a gig of ram. 

The sample rate and bit depth are more personal choices.  I'd prefer to mix with the bit depth and rate before I dither to 44.1/16.  That's just me.  External hard drives are cheap enough and burning a project onto DVD after you've needed it is cheaper.  Adds no work to what I do for back-up otherwise,...

Davii:

do you not have an external drive?  You'll need that!  The read/writes to the same drive will cause what you're hearing.

Hate to say - your laptop is old and you are exceeding its capabilities. you can remain in denial or step it down to something your laptop can handle. Or you can keep spending money chasing the big white whale.

Oh, and please enlighten us to the exotic audio equipment your live gig uses that merits 96kHz sample rate.

Scoobie

davii
 
I've got 8Gb of RAM arriving in a few days, then I'll look to heading back to the studio to see how much of an impact that has. 
 

Ram has absolutely nothing to do with recording live audio.   Spend your money on something eles.
No need to record at 96K, it's just a wast of space on your harddrive.
 
Love my HD24, it fits in my rack with all my outboard gear !
 
Tim

I realise that RAM isn't the main thing for recording audio, but I took the view that running in single-channel mode with differing sized modules might not be helping matters, forcing the system to make use of the drive to store processing info (the amount of free memory was extremely low) that would also then require retrieval...whilst also accessing the drive to store the recorded audio itself and so on.
 
I just figured that the RAM config as was probably not helping the overall (64bit) system
 
My HD24 was cool, until the Alpha-Numeric screen packed up one night. Cost me nearly as much to replace both screens as it had cost me for the whole thing in the first place. The venue I was at at the time stopped doing live music and lugging it around on public transport, often during rush hour, to do work here n' there afterwards became a bit too much to realisticly do on an ongoing basis

mark s


I'll agree ram has nothing to do with audio recording.  I was doing 8 tracks 96/24 with a P-II and a gig of ram. 

The sample rate and bit depth are more personal choices.  I'd prefer to mix with the bit depth and rate before I dither to 44.1/16.  That's just me.  External hard drives are cheap enough and burning a project onto DVD after you've needed it is cheaper.  Adds no work to what I do for back-up otherwise,...

Davii:

do you not have an external drive?  You'll need that!  The read/writes to the same drive will cause what you're hearing.

Not at the moment, the Raptor mentioned earlier is now the OS drive of the PC at home. I'd thought that having an external USB HDD attached should make things harder for the system/data flow, than compared to dumping it straight to the internal drive?

wintaper


Hate to say - your laptop is old and you are exceeding its capabilities. you can remain in denial or step it down to something your laptop can handle. Or you can keep spending money chasing the big white whale.

Oh, and please enlighten us to the exotic audio equipment your live gig uses that merits 96kHz sample rate.

I don't think it is exceding its capabilities though - this is only recording incoming audio, rather than simultaneous playback and record, no plugins etc.
 
The whole thing with 96 is down to whether the client wants their recording done at that rate, especially as I've seen others advertising that option, so I'm trying to make sure that I can cover that angle before saying so. With most bands, I'll suggest that they'll need to be able to deal with that rate once they have the raw tracks back and no doubt most won't, so the conversation moves to 44.1 or 48 unless they insist on 96 regardless.
 
"Exotic audio equipment" is neither here nor there as far as I'm concerned. I'm only providing the ability to record, not to otherwise equipe a venue with products that you, I, or anyone else, think makes it worthwhile